Wang Su walked the village perimeter in the first month of the third year and told me things I didn't want to hear.
"Prefect Shen's forces are repositioning north along the Qinghe border, and the Meishan prefecture has gone quiet."
I cupped my chin in thought.
A quiet Meishan was worse than a loud one. Prefect Shen going silent meant either he'd been given orders to consolidate or he'd been told to prepare for a larger undertaking. It could be a campaign towards our position in the Western Reaches once the peace treaty ends the winter of this year, or he could be mobilizing for a war to the north.
Regardless, I increased the militia's conditioning sessions that week and said nothing to the village yet since I didn't have more information to go off on.
It was during this time of concern that I found Mother asleep in the clinic when I stopped by.
Or so I thought.
She lay on the bed near the window, blanket pulled to her chest, breathing shallow and slow. I stood beside her and counted the breaths the way I'd been doing for months without telling anyone. Twelve per minute in the first year. Ten in the second. Eight now, on a good day. The intervals between inhales stretched longer each season.
I leaned closer and placed two fingers against the lung mai point on her wrist. The pulse was there but thin, and the qi density beneath it had dropped since my last reading two weeks ago.
Her eyes opened.
"What are you doing?"
I pulled my hand back. "Checking your pulse."
She sat up, and the motion cost her a cough that she barely managed to swallow down. "How long have you been doing this?"
I didn't answer.
"How long, Liang?"
"For about two years now."
She stared at me, and her gaze made me want to divert my eyes from her. "Stop looking at me like I'm already dead."
"Your breathing is shallower than last month."
"I know what my breathing is. Suyin monitors it and she's better at it than you, and she at least has the decency to do it when I'm awake." She pulled the blanket aside and swung her legs off the bed and motioned for me to sit.
I sat down.
"You've been different since your father died," she said. "A mother knows these things. The way you spoke changed, the way you thought changed, and the boy who threw rocks at birds and stole vegetables from Old Chen's stands hasn't come back from that grief."
My hands balled into fists.
"Hao sees it too. Whatever happened to you when your father died, whatever burden you put on yourself to protect this village and everyone in it, it changed you at the root." She looked at me. Her eyes were clear, bright, as sharp as ever. "I need you to hear something-"
"Mother..."
She raised her hand. "I'm not finished." She steadied her breathing.
"Sun Ai told me something when I was your age. She said that a person must cultivate their own life, or else cultivation will own their life. I didn't understand it then. I was young and the work was everything." She paused. "But I do understand it now. And I see you making the same mistake that same mistake."
She paused to stifle a cough.
"You built walls and forged weapons and trained fighters and killed a man who threatened your village. And now you're checking your my pulse because you're waiting for the next thing to fight. The next crisis that justifies spending every waking hour planning instead of living."
The words landed in places I'd been avoiding. I unfurled my fists and looked down at my hands that began to tremor once more. Would this be the time to tell someone, anyone, who or what I truly am? That I'm not from here? That the son she knew is gone and I had somehow taken his place?
"Mother. Would you believe me if I told you that I am different now? That something changed in me and I'm afraid to admit what comes with it?"
She reached forward and took both my hands. Her grip was thin but firm. She looked me in the eyes and held me there.
"Chains weigh you down even when they are removed. The only person who can allow you to be yourself..." She lifted one hand and pressed it against my chest. "Is you."
I sat there with her hand on my chest and felt the truth of it settle through me like water finding level ground. The chains she meant weren't the ones I carried from my old life. They were the ones I'd forged here. The planning. The control. The relentless forward momentum that never paused because pausing meant feeling, and feeling meant admitting that the logistics coordinator hiding inside a farmer's son was terrified of the life he'd built because he'd never accounted for the people in it.
Hao didn't have this problem. Hao had never had this problem. He loved freely, built family instinctively, opened his arms to three wives and four children and an entire village without once stopping to calculate the risk. I'd spent three years wondering how he did it, how he moved through the world with that openness, that warmth, that refusal to hold anything at arm's length.
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This must be how he naturally lives.
"Now go," she said. "I have work to do and you have that look on your face that I recognize all to well," She raised a hand to my cheek. "And Liang?"
"Yes, mother?"
"If I catch you checking my pulse while I sleep again, I will hit you with the grinding stone."
I smiled and nodded at her words. "Yes, mother."
I left my home and ventured to the clinic counter when I found Suyin in the storage room sorting through notes.
She'd laid out Mother's health notes in chronological order. The notes ranged from pulse readings and breathing measurements to qi density readings from the pressure points she monitored weekly.
She looked at my as I walked in and pointed to one of the notes and said, "Look at the trend line."
I looked.
The progression was systemic.
I had assumed due to her cough that it was a pulmonary disease of some kind, but the qi readings showed a gradual decline in baseline density across all twelve mai, not just the lung pathway. Whatever was happening to Mother, it was constitutional.
"Why are you only showing me this now?" I asked her, my tone was more short than I had intended it to be.
She didn't flinch. "I've been working the problem alone because I thought I could solve it. I couldn't. The progression doesn't match anything in the Mother of Healing or in the clinical notes from the neighboring villages."
"Working the problem alone...." I said the words to myself and exhaled a deep sigh.
Suyin perked a brow at my words.
"Suyin. I need to tell you something."
She waited.
"At the feast, what I said to you..." My hands were trembling again so I pressed them flat against the counter. "I panicked. I felt that you liked me and I didn't know what to do."
She was very still.
"I told myself I was protecting you but the truth is, I miss holding your hand," I looked at her. "I'm sorry for not being honest with my feelings."
Suyin's eyes searched my face. I saw the moment she read me, the way she read patients, looking past the surface to the feeling underneath.
She put her hand over mine on the counter and her fingers wrapped around my trembling ones and held them still.
"I miss holding your hand too."
Those words set my mind and heart at ease. Common sense, that's what I was trying to bring to this world right? Well, that also included my own life, and common sense was to grant myself the permission to hold her hand. It didn't have to be anymore complicated than that.
Suddenly, a realization struck my mind and my eyes went wide.
"Sun Ai."
Suyin blinked. "Huh?"
"Mother's teacher. She knew Mother before she came to Hekou. She'd have more information and maybe lead us in the right direction to healing her."
Suyin regained her composure and nodded. "She's from Chenjia village, that's east of the river fork."
I nodded. "We can bring her here and give her access to everything we've built." My hand tightened around Suyin's.
"You should talk to Hao, maybe he'd know more," Suyin suggested.
"Yea, you're right," I agreed and left, my hand slipping out of her grasp.
I found Hao at the well.
I told him about the charts. About Sun Ai. About Mother's condition being constitutional and the need to bring Sun Ai and her entire family if necessary to Hekou. He didn't hesitate.
"We can send riders to Chenjia within the week. We can also do the same for father's family as well. We might as well bring them all while we can."
I perked a brow at his words, and what he was insinuating. "You intend to build up the clan?"
He looked at me. "Yes, we need to also have a written account of our family's history moving forward with Mother being be the matriarch. The line can trace through her since everything converges on her."
I couldn't argue against that. Without Mother I don't think we would have made it this far. Her intel on integrating the Chen widow back to the labor rotation was vital, and her knowledge of Mai was what allowed for us to become cultivators in the first place. Our clan, our village, and our future sect, owed a great deal to her.
"She's the mother of two wolves too," I added.
Hao smiled. "That she is."
Hao's smiled slowly faded and his gaze met mine.
"But as for you, the Dongshan families are still asking if you're spoken for."
"Hao-"
"You're eighteen, Liang, what are you waiting for? Father didn't wait. I certainly didn't wait either," He paused. "I'm not telling you to marry the next woman who smiles at you. I'm telling you that there are people who want to be apart of your legacy."
I thought about it. In a village that looked to them to lead, having no heirs was a structural issue. I couldn't view their expectations to what made sense to me, I had to look at it from their perspective. Through our family line they saw a continuation of quality values, depriving them of that would be misguided on my part.
"I'll work on it," I said finally, because honestly, it was all a work in progress anyways.
"That's all I'm asking."
Bolin appeared on the path suddenly. "Riders at the gate. It's Administrator Wen."
Hao and I exchanged looks and walked to the gate together. Wen sat on his grey horse with four soldiers, document case at his hip. He dismounted, surveyed the village, the double walls, the forge smoke, the training ground through the tree line, and gave a nod.
"Pei Liang." He produced a sealed letter with Commander Xu's mark in red wax.
I broke the seal.
Pei Liang. Your presence is requested at Lanyu. Travel arrangements have been made. Administrator Wen will escort you. The treaty expires in winter. We have much to discuss.
Hao looked at the letter and frowned, as we both recognized that the timing couldn't have been any worse. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Come back in one piece."
I placed my hand on his back, "I always do."
I went inside to pack and knelt beside the floorboards and lifted the loose one.
The spirit stone hummed in its ceramic jar.
I lifted it out and carried it to the clinic.
Suyin was still there reviewing the charts that she'd shown me two days ago, running the numbers one more time.
"I'm leaving for Lanyu," I said. "Commander Xu's summons. I don't know how long."
She looked up. Her face held the same controlled stillness she'd been wearing the past three years, except now her expression softened just a touch enough to show vulnerability.
I set the wrapped stone on the table.
"This is something I've kept hidden since the ridge cave expedition. Hao and Bolin are the only others who know about it."
I unwrapped it.
The qi filled the room and Suyin's breath caught in her throat. Her meridians responded visibly, her hands flexing involuntarily as the concentrated energy pressed against her awareness.
"A spirit stone," I began to say. "It's concentrated natural qi. I've been studying it since I found it but I haven't found a use for it. I don't fully understand the mechanics yet."
She stared at the stone. "Are you're giving this to me?"
"I'm trusting you with it. If we can't reach Sun Ai in time, or if the condition accelerates before she arrives, this stone may have healing properties that our current techniques can't match. Your medical cultivation path makes you the only person who might be able to apply it safely." I paused. "Study it but don't use it until you understand the interaction it can have on the human body. But if Mother needs it, I trust your judgment."
Suyin reached for the stone. "Why leave it with me? Why not Hao?"
"Because you're the best healer I know. If anyone can figure out what this stone does to the human body, it's you."
She took my hand in hers.
I returned the gesture immediately and held her hands in mine, and I could feel the wall that once existed between us begin to close.
"Be careful out there," she said.
"Be careful with that stone," I said back to her.
I squeezed her hand one more time before letting go. I picked up my bag and walked out of the clinic into the morning light.
Hao was at the gate and Wen was mounted on his horse.
I climbed into the saddle and looked back at Hekou one last time.
Then I turned east and rode.